Marc Vanderleenen (1952)
Marc Vanderleenen (1952) is perhaps the most 'pessimistic' painter of the so called 'Antwerp gray school'. His often dirty green, gray blue or pale brown canvases offer implicit images of decay, loneliness, anonymity and implosion. A human figure on a forest road in dim light, a fading interior, a half-collapsed house, an empty tailor-made suit: nothing is what it seems, Vanderleenen does not tell stories, but shows images of existential desperation. "Exercises in hardly articulating," he calls it. In painting every movement is a continuation of the previous one, every random line pushes the story to a different end, to a different image. Life is doubting, according to Vanderleenen.